Patents and Innovation

This page collects my work related to patents and innovation. The 2015 AER paper with Roin and Williams remains one of my proudest professional accomplishments. We show theoretically and empirically that cancer research incentives are distorted towards treatment of late-stage disease and away from research on preventing cancer in the first place. This relates to broader concerns about incentives for long-horizon innovation versus so-called “short termism.”

Durvasula, Roin, Williams and I just released a new paper on what we call “Missing Markets for Innovation.” We show that there are large categories of potential innovation for which IP rights are ineffective and hence provide zero private-sector innovation incentives. The problem of New Uses of Existing Drugs is a canonical example of the phenomenon that we use for our empirical work.

I have also conducted research on innovation incentives in the context of Covid-19 vaccines and even the adoption of new market designs. I describe this latter problem as “Will the Market Fix the Market?”